Advertising

At a dinner party the other night, a very accomplished business person told a story about how he and his wife were certain that their devices were listening to their conversations. “I was talking to my wife about a pair of designer shoes that she wanted to purchase, and not 10 minutes later while she was doing some online research for work, she saw an ad for that exact pair of shoes. She hadn’t searched for the shoes; the ad just appeared. Clearly, our computers or our phones are listening.” Some people nodded in agreement, and others began to chime in. Continue Reading →

Welcome back to the "Elon Channel," where it's "All Elon, All The Time." Today is pink slip day – with an Elon twist, of course. If you wake up to a work email, you still have a job. If Twitter HR sends an email to your personal email address… you're fired. This is twisted. Continue Reading →

Welcome to day five of the "Elon Channel," where it's "All Elon, All The Time." After taking over as Chief Twit (his words, not mine), Elon wrote, "Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences." He followed that with, "Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world." I won't pretend to guess what Elon was thinking when he wrote these words, but his actions betray any hope of Twitter regaining the trust of major advertisers. Continue Reading →

I'm at the point where I'm going to give up on any potential for a universally-accepted definition for the word "metaverse." It has devolved into a key ingredient of word salad. Continue Reading →

The founders of Taiv had an idea: What if a sports bar owner could make an extra $500 every month by using technology to replace the commercials in TV broadcasts with commercials they sold themselves? It is an awesome idea. It is also a blatant theft of services. Continue Reading →

iRobot, the company that makes Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, has agreed to be acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion, according to a joint statement. If the deal closes, Amazon will have access to the maps a Roomba makes of each room it cleans. Continue Reading →

Back in June '21, Kim Kardashian shilled Ethereum Max on Instagram. When I learned about it, I wrote, “I’ve just become aware of the best example of everything that is bad (and hopefully temporary) about crypto-insanity.” Continue Reading →

First-party cookies are important. They help web publishers customize your experience. Third-party cookies are important for advertisers – and Google wants them gone. Continue Reading →

The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act was introduced Thursday by a group of key senators on the Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust: the ranking member and chair, Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as well as Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. If passed, the bipartisan bill would force Google to break up its ad business. Continue Reading →

As you know, there are only three business models: I pay, you pay, or someone else pays. While everyone says they hate commercials, ad-supported business models simply refuse to die. Why? "Free" (aka "someone else pays") is very compelling for both consumers and shareholders. So compelling, in fact, that our friends at Netflix are looking to introduce their lower-priced ad-supported tier by the end of the year. Continue Reading →